Stop Calling It Digital Signage

This article is part of a series by Intuiface CEO Mathieu Yerle. Subscribe to his Substack, Screen Heresy, for early access to his latest posts.

‍Written from the floor of , where I've spent the last few days talking to integrators, industry experts, and platform vendors. The conversations have been excellent. The label on the door has not gotten any more accurate.

‍

In my last post, I wrote about the Cooper Hewitt digital pen. Visitors walk in to the museum, pick up a digital wand, and spend the next hour adding wallpaper patterns and chair designs into a private gallery they can consult using in-venue touch-tables. They tap. They draw. Then they walk out with a personal URL of everything they touched and annotated.

Now ask the obvious question. Is that digital signage?

Technically, sure. There are screens involved. There’s a content management system somewhere in the building. There’s a network pushing media to displays. By the trade-show definition, it qualifies.

But nobody at Cooper Hewitt calls it digital signage. Nobody at the agency that built it calls it digital signage. And no visitor walking out of that museum has ever said “the signage was great today.”

This is happening everywhere. The work is getting more interesting. The vocabulary is falling apart.

Before you close this tab

I know how this sounds. A CEO writing 1,200 words about what to call things is exactly the kind of self-indulgent industry exercise nobody asked for. Trust me, I’d rather be writing about something else, too.

But this isn’t really about semantics. It’s about whether the industry’s vocabulary still matches what the market is actually looking for and buying - and what happens commercially when it doesn’t. Categories shape budgets. They shape who reports to whom. They shape what gets benchmarked against what, and at what price.

When the language drifts far enough from the work, the work gets misvalued. That’s not a wordsmithing problem. That’s a margin problem.

So bear with me.

What buyers actually say

I spend a lot of time talking to the people writing the checks. Pharmaceutical companies. Real estate developers. Medical schools. Car manufacturers. Museums. Retail brands.

Almost none of them describe what they’re buying as digital signage.

A pharma company building a sales enablement tool that connects live to their ERP and lets reps configure treatment regimens in front of physicians calls it a sales enablement experience. A medical school running immersive anatomy simulations across a wall of touchscreens calls it a teaching environment. A real estate developer with an interactive sales gallery where buyers configure units, layouts, and wall finishes calls it a sales experience. A museum calls it an exhibit. A flagship store calls it an activation.

These are the projects driving premium budgets in the digital signage category. And the category name doesn’t fit any of them.

The label still works at the bottom of the market - menu boards, lobby loops, schedule displays, the proof-of-play world I wrote about in my first post. That is genuinely digital signage, and it isn’t going away. But it’s also where margins are getting squeezed hardest. The interesting money has moved upstream, into work that the language can no longer describe.

The industry is naming a slice, not a category

Here’s the structural problem. “Digital signage” describes a delivery mechanism - content pushed to a screen on a schedule. It doesn’t describe what the work does.

Compare that to how the rest of the marketing stack talks about itself. Nobody calls Salesforce “database software.” Nobody calls Figma “vector drawing software.” Those would be technically accurate and commercially useless. The categories that win describe what the work accomplishes, not what the wires do.

Our industry still names itself by the wires, and then wonders why CMOs keep funding the work out of experience budgets, brand budgets, customer experience budgets, retail innovation budgets - anywhere except the digital signage line item.

The buyers have already left the category. They just haven’t told the trade press yet.

What it might be called instead

I’ll be honest. I don’t think anyone has fully nailed the new name yet, including us.

At Intuiface we’ve been using “Interactive Experience Platform” - IXP - internally. It captures what the work is. But it sits in a crowded zone. Half the SaaS world has claimed some version of “experience platform” by now, and most of them are overclaiming. I’m not convinced IXP is the label that sticks. It might be. It might be something else entirely. I genuinely don’t know yet, and I’d rather say that than oversell a three-letter acronym.

What I’m more sure about is the direction. The work is moving toward experiences that are bidirectional rather than broadcast, adaptive rather than scheduled, curated rather than looped, and measured by what people did rather than by whether the file played. Whatever the category ends up being called, those are its properties.

The label matters less than the shift. And the shift is already happening, name or no name.

Why this isn’t just a vocabulary problem

Categories shape budgets. They shape who reports to whom. They shape what shows up on analyst maps and what gets benchmarked against what. When a pharmaceutical sales enablement tool gets classified as digital signage, it gets compared to lobby screens. It gets priced against lobby screens. It gets bought by the same procurement team that buys lobby screens.

That’s a problem for the buyer, who’s trying to fund something far more strategic. It’s a problem for the integrator, who’s competing on price-per-display and price-per-player against vendors building genuinely different products. And it’s a problem for the industry, which keeps measuring its health with metrics that capture only a shrinking part of what it actually does.

The serious agencies have figured this out. Walk a project floor at one of the better experience design firms, and you’ll see digital signage skills - CMS, network deployment, content scheduling - being applied inside a frame that nobody on the team would call digital signage. They use the technical vocabulary internally. They use experience vocabulary with clients. They’re already operating in two languages.

The rest of the industry will have to follow. The buyers are pulling them there whether the trade press catches up or not.

What to do about it

If you’re inside this industry, I’d push two things.

First, listen carefully to how your buyers describe what they want. Not the RFP language, which still uses the old category words because procurement systems do. The conversation before the RFP. The conversation in the room. That’s where the new vocabulary leaks out, and it’s almost never “we need digital signage.”

Second, stop benchmarking the interesting work against the loop work. A pharma sales tool that closes deals faster is not in the same business as a menu board that shows today’s specials. They share infrastructure. They don’t share value. Pricing them the same way, measuring them the same way, and selling them through the same channel is how premium work gets dragged down to commodity margins.

The category is shifting underneath the label. The buyers are already there. The question is how long the industry waits before it admits the word on the door doesn’t match the work inside.

‍